José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero Biography

Just three days after a series of bomb blasts killed nearly two hundred in
Madrid in March of 2004, Spanish voters went to the polls and elected the
socialist party of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero into office. As
prime minister, Zapatero promised to withdraw Spanish forces from Iraq,
and ordered those troops home just hours after he was sworn in four weeks
later. His party's victory was widely seen as a rejection of the
pro-American policies of his predecessor, José María Aznar and
his Popular Party (PP).

Came from renowned liberal family

Zapatero was born in 1960 in the city of Valladolid, north of Madrid. His
family were of Castilian background and were originally from the city of
León. His father was an attorney; his grandfather had been killed
during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Spain had established a
republic in 1931, with the king abdicating his throne, but civil
unrest continued, and reached a crisis point by 1936. A military officer,
Francisco Franco, attempted a coup, and a bloody war ensued.
Zapatero's grandfather, who fought on the Republican side, was
slain by Franco's soldiers during the first weeks of the war.

Franco and his Nationalists ultimately won the war and installed a
military dictatorship that endured until Franco's death in 1976.
Zapatero was sixteen years old at the time. He attended his first
political meeting just a few weeks later, in August of 1976, although
political parties were still technically illegal. At that rally, he was
impressed by a speaker, future prime minister Felipe González, and
joined González's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, or
PSOE, two years later. Zapatero went on to study law, and taught the
subject at León University from 1982 to 1986. At the lectern, he
specialized in Spanish constitutional law, a relatively new field with
Spain's constitution in place only since 1978.

Zapatero also became a rising star in the PSOE. He headed the
party's youth organization in León, and in 1986, when he was
just twenty-six years old, became the youngest member of parliament when
he was elected from the province of León on the PSOE ticket. The PSOE
dominated Spain's post-Franco political era. González, head of
the party, became prime minister in 1982, and held the post for the next
fourteen years. Corruption scandals, however, blackened the party's
reputation in the early 1990s. In response, Spanish voters elected the
center-right Popular Party (PP) of José María Aznar in 1996.

"My most immediate priority is to beat all forms of
terrorism."

Rose to party leadership post

By 1988 Zapatero had been elected secretary-general of the PSOE chapter in
León province. Over the next decade he worked to reform the party
from inside, as a response to the corruption scandals. He and

Spain's Basque Problem

Terrorist threats were already a fact of life for Spaniards long before
a series of bombs in backpacks went off in Madrid on March 11, 2004.
Since the 1960s a Basque group, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), had carried
out similar acts in order to gain support for their goal of political
sovereignty.

The Basques number nearly three million, but not all of them live in
Spain. Some reside in mountain villages just across Spain's
border with France in the Pyrenees. Their language, Euskara, is
different from any other language in the world. Linguists believe it may
have origins in the Sino-Tibetan language family, or is connected with
the Berber language of North Africa.

The origins of the Basque people have been one of Europe's
greatest mysteries. They may have come to Europe with the Indo-European
migration that occurred around 2000
B.C.E.
Another theory claims they were settled in the Iberian peninsula (Spain
and Portugal) long before, when Cro-Magnon man became dominant in
Europe. This would make them Europe's oldest surviving ethnic
group. They survived the Roman Empire invasions, and ambushed and
massacred Charlemagne's troops in 778
C.E.
in what is known as the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.

For centuries the Basques remained isolated and self-sufficient,
weathering the Moorish Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula as well
as a series of successive kingdoms that dominated Spain. They converted
to Christianity, but may have been sunworshippers in earlier times.
Renowned fishers, they became major suppliers of cod to the rest of
Europe, but where they found their fish remained a mystery for hundreds
of years. Then, in the 1530s, French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived at
the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Canada and reported thousands of
Basque fishing boats already there.

The Basques managed to maintain much of their unique identity for
generations. They were nominally allied with the Spanish monarchy, but
had their own set of laws, called
fueros.
Their independence was eroded after the terms of deals made during
Spain's contentious internal wars during the nineteenth century
were not honored. During the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s they
surrendered to Italian troops, and Spain's victorious military
dictator, Francisco Franco, removed nearly all of their autonomy.

Out of that grew the ETA, a guerrilla group formed in 1959. It carried
out its first attack, a train derailment, two years later. The first
death from an ETA act came in 1968. In 1973 ETA operatives assassinated
the Spanish prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. Over the next
three decades, the ETA planted car bombs and devices on trains, but a
crackdown limited much of their power by 2003, when a train-station
attack on Christmas Eve was successfully thwarted by the
government's anti-terrorism squad. Few thought the ETA was
repsonsible for the Atocha attacks in March of the following year, since
the group almost always alerted authorities to a bomb they had planted.

a coalition of other like-minded PSOE politicians urged a modernization of
the party's platform, modeling it after Tony Blair's remake
of the Labour Party in the mid-1990s. The reform movement gained momentum,
but the PSOE failed to beat Aznar's party in national elections
held in March of 2000. The head of the PSOE at the time,
Joaquín Almunia, resigned as a result of the poor showing, and at
the next party conference that July, PSOE delegates elected Zapatero as
their new national secretary-general. Elizabeth Nash, a writer for
London's
Independent
newspaper, quoted Zapatero as saying he would personally "lead
this party once more to victory and the biggest one in its
history." He added, "We need change, tranquil change. Our
hope is for victory in 2004."

Zapatero began to take steps to win over Spanish voters to his party. In
the fall of 2000, Zapatero and Aznar forged an agreement that their
parties would work together to eliminate the threat of home-grown
terrorists, which had been a serious concern in Spain for a number of
years. A separatist movement in the north of Spain, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna
(ETA), translated as "Basque Fatherland and Liberty," had
emerged in the 1960s, and called attention to its cause through bombings
and assasinations. More than eight hundred Spaniards had died since then.
Zapatero and Aznar pledged that they would not allow the ETA threat to be
used for the political gain of their own parties, and pledged to work
together to end the bloodshed. They even led a march through the streets
of Barcelona against ETA terrorism that November.

The renewed effort against the ETA seemed to work, and many arrests were
made. At the same time, Aznar's PP government was proving
increasingly unpopular. It was criticized for its handling of an oil
tanker spill off Spain's northern coastline in Galicia in November
of 2002, which paralyzed the region's fishing industry for months.
It was later revealed that Aznar's government had initially
underreported the scope of the environmental disaster. In May of 2003 an
aging military transport plane carrying Spanish troops back from
Afghanistan crashed in Turkey, killing sixty-two. Protesters called for
the resignation of Aznar's minister of defense, saying the
Soviet-made, Soviet-era planes were known to have been unsafe.

Opposed war in Iraq

Aznar's most serious political error, however, seemed to be his
support of U.S. President George W. Bush in the latter's effort to
oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 2003. Aznar's decision to send
a small contingent of Spanish troops to join the coalition forces that
invaded
Iraq was met with a public outcry; opinion polls showed that seventy
percent of Spaniards opposed the war. Zapatero took a strong stance
against the war. As PSOE head, Zapatero rejected any alliance with
America, although Aznar had tried to persuade him to give his support in
the interests of national unity. After meeting with Aznar, Zapatero
appeared at a press conference and told journalists that he refused to
comply with Aznar's plea. "I told him the Socialist Party
does not support a preventive attack on Iraq,"
New York Times
writer Emma Daly quoted him as saying, "because there are no
causes and reasons to justify an action of this magnitude."

In the run-up to the 2004 national elections, one of Zapatero's
first campaign promises had been a pledge to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish
troops in Iraq if elected. "This government doesn't serve
Spaniards anymore, it only serves the interests of Bush,"
New York Times
writer Lizette Alvarez quoted him as saying. As the election season moved
into full swing, many were surprised at Zapatero's new fierceness
on the campaign trail, as he condemned Aznar's government in the
strongest terms. In past years, newspaper editorial cartoonists had
sometimes poked fun of Zapatero as
Sosoman,
or "Dullman," depicting him wearing a superhero costume.

The Madrid bombings, thought to have been timed to disrupt the Spanish
elections, seemed to be the decisive factor in the PSOE victory at the
polls. On March 11, a series of bombs went off at Madrid's main
train station and on trains elsewhere in the city during the morning rush
hour. The catastrophe, the deadliest attack on European soil since World
War II, left 192 dead and more than 1,400 injured. The Aznar government
initially blamed it on ETA terrorists, but evidence began to mount that
the attack might have been carried out by al-Qaeda—the terrorist
group responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United
States—operatives in Spain. Spaniards who were opposed to the war
in Iraq noted that Aznar's decision to side with the Bush White
House had made Spain vulnerable to such attacks. They took to the streets
by the thousands to mourn the dead and voice their opposition to
government policy as well. Despite evidence pointing to al-Qaeda, the
Aznar government continued to insist that ETA had been responsible, which
was widely viewed as a political ploy to forestall a loss at the polls
that weekend.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (left) is sworn in as the
Prime Minister of Spain, April 17, 2004. Onlookers include Spanish
King Juan Carlos (right) and Queen Sofia.

Recalled troops from Iraq

Three days later, on Sunday, a record voter turnout ousted Aznar's
party and his handpicked successor, Mariano Rajoy, in favor of Zapatero
and the PSOE. Even Rajoy was jeered by protesters when he cast his own
ballot at a Madrid polling station. In the official tally the Popular
Party won 38 percent of the vote, but Zapatero's socialists took 43
percent of the vote and 164 seats out of the 350 in the Cortes, the lower
house of parliament. The PSOE won 29 seats more than it had in the
previous election.

Just days after the election, a leading newspaper in Spain,
El Pais,
published an interview with Zapatero. "The war in Iraq was a huge
mistake," he asserted, according to an article by
New York Times
correspondent Elaine Sciolino. "There was no motive. It was done
without international consensus, and the management of the occupation has
been a disaster." For his cabinet, Spain's new prime
minister named a respected diplomat, Miguel Angel Moratinos, to be his
foreign minister. Moratinos was a veteran of Middle Eastern diplomacy
issues, and had previously served as Spain's ambassador to Israel.

Zapatero was sworn into office on April 17, 2004, by King Juan Carlos at
Madrid's Zarzuela Palace. Twenty-four hours later, he made
the announcement that he had ordered all 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq to
return home as soon as possible. During his first year in office, he also
proved to be a liberal on domestic matters. He pledged to create new
policies that would grant same-sex couples in Spain the same legal rights
as married heterosexuals. A year earlier, the Cortes had passed a new law,
amidst great controversy, that forced all public schools in Spain to make
religious instruction a part of the curriculum. Zapatero announced that
his government would not allow the law to go into effect. Furthermore, he
vowed to eliminate gender bias in Spain via a sweeping series of new laws.

Zapatero's wife, Sonsoles Espinosa, maintains a low profile and
rarely appears by his side. She is a voice teacher and shuns the political
spotlight. The couple have two daughters.